Invited speakers

Diana Mesquita

Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Do you feel students' resistance to active learning? Possibilities to the teaching practice.

Much has been written about the use of active learning in Higher Education, highlighting its benefits. The research also shows that teachers’ adoption of active learning has been slow. The most common barriers identified concern student resistance which can be understood as "any negative behavioural or attitudinal response to a teaching practice that could discourage instructors from using active learning" (Andrews et al., 2020, p.143). This talk aims to explore possibilities to the teaching practice, in order to mitigate students' resistance to active learning.

Madison E. Andrews, Matthew Graham, Michael Prince, Maura Borrego, Cynthia J. Finelli & Jenefer Husman (2020) Student resistance to active learning: do instructors (mostly) get it wrong?, Australasian Journal of Engineering Education, 25:2, 142-154, DOI: 10.1080/22054952.2020.1861771.

SHORT CV

Diana Mesquita is currently an invited Assistant Professor at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Porto, Portugal. She holds a PhD in Educational Sciences, specialized in Curriculum Development from University of Minho, Portugal. She delivered more than 60 workshops dedicated to teacher training in Portugal, Brazil, Colombia, Russia and Thailand. She participated in several national and international projects, organized more than 20 national and international conferences and has around 80 publications of articles in international journals, book chapters and scientific events. Her research interests include active learning, project-based learning, teacher professional development, curriculum innovation, higher education and engineering education. She is a member of the Portuguese Society of Educational Sciences (SPCE) and of the Portuguese Society for Engineering Education (SPEE). She is also a scientific reviewer in several leading journals, such as the European Journal of Teacher Education (Routledge) and Journal of Engineering Education (Wiley).

Juarez Bento da Silva

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

ACADEMIC TRAJECTORY LINKED TO RESEARCH AND EXTENSION: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE LABORATORY OF REMOTE EXPERIMENTATION OF THE FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF SANTA CATARINA.

The lecture will focus on the research and extension actions carried out by RExLab throughout its 25 years of activities, mainly on the attraction and training strategies of scholarship holders. Throughout these years, RExLab has hosted a total of 200 scholars from the most diverse educational levels, that is, Basic Education, with high school scholars, to post-doctoral fellows. RExLab seeks to value the work of Scientific Initiation scholarship holders (SI), assigning them relevant activities and protagonism in research and extension projects, as well as in the scientific production of the nucleus. The active participation of the scholarship holders in the projects offers them the opportunity to know a whole network of researchers in which RExLab is inserted, whether they are students or teachers. This networking has been shown to be important, for example, to provide exchange opportunities for scholarship holders, in addition to providing contact with researchers and research projects coordinated by experienced professors, in Brazil and abroad. This conjuncture certainly brings various advantages of SI in the curricula, in professional growth and in the academic maturation of the participating students.

SHORT CV

Juarez Bento da Silva holds a degree in Business Administration at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (1991), a Master's in Computer Science at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (2002), a PhD in Engineering and Knowledge Management at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (2007) and a Post-Doctorate at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Portugal (2016). He is currently an Associate Professor at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, where he works as a professor in the undergraduate courses in Information and Communication Technologies and in the Graduate Program in ICT, where he is also sub-coordinator. He is member of the Remote Experimentation Laboratory (RExLab) research group, where he is coordinator. He has about 150 publications of articles in journals, books and book chapters. Regarding research and extension projects, these are primarily aimed at the integration of technologies in education, with the development and availability of virtual and remote laboratories being one of the main lines of action. For more information, CV here.